Book Note: The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

Morgan, Jude. The Secret Life of William Shakespeare. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2014.

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This is one of the books I brought with me to pass the time in the various airports I needed to go through to get to Vietnam. But the problem was that this novel made the time hang more heavy on my hands instead. That's one reason I stuck a "Free Book!" note to the cover and abandoned it in the Tokyo airport.

The writing isn't terrible—it's just uninspired. Will wants to obey his father's sanction agains hanging out with players, but he can't help himself.

Later, he wants to obey his vows of fidelity to Anne, and he does for quite a while. And then he can't help himself.

And Anne wants to trust her husband.  And she does for a while.  But then she can't help herself, and she runs off to London.

Sensing a trend?

The novel fills in the gaps in the biographical record, but not very imaginatively.

The plays are also downplayed somewhat. I'd like to have more of the creative side explored.

Here's a page that will give you a sample of the writing. On this page, Shakespeare is still back in Stratford, feeling guilty about going to a play.

All in all, you'd be better off with Grace Tiffany's biographical Shakespeare novel (for which, q.v.).

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The First Day in Hanoi

Jones, Keith. A Series of Lectures on Shakespeare. Vietnam National University—Hanoi. 7-10 March 2016.

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After too many hours of travel to count, I have arrived in Hanoi. The city is fabulous, the people are delightful, and the food is terrific.

I wandered around Hoàn Kiếm Lake today, soaking in the atmosphere and adjusting to the jet lag. I met an Australian couple and took their photo by the lake. They were amazed that I would travel so far to speak about Shakespeare.

I feel very much like the actor in A Dream in Hanoi who felt like catching up all of Hanoi in a net (for which, q.v.). In that clip, in fact, he's drawing the Turtle Tower in the lake that's just a stone's throw from my hotel.

An English teacher and her students asked if they could practice their English on me as I walked around the lake. When she heard that I was a Shakespeare scholar, she remembered having read Romeo and Juliet some time ago.

The students were interested in telling me the legend of Lê Lợi, the great hero of Vietnamese history. They told of his magic sword, his rallying the people, and his victories to establish independence, bringing Vietnam out of Chinese rule.  You can read more of his story over on Wikipedia.

Just as I started to tell them about Henry V, they said they had to go.

The lectures will start on Monday. Perhaps I'll be able to work in some of the story of Lê Lợi somewhere!

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Shakespeare Lectures in Vietnam

Jones, Keith. A Series of Lectures on Shakespeare. Vietnam National University—Hanoi. 7-10 March 2016.

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Last semester, I was invited by the Vietnam National University to come to Hanoi an lecture on Shakespeare. Thanks to a generous grant from the Faculty Development Committee of the  University of Northwestern—St. Paul, I was able to accept the invitation. In fact, I leave tomorrow morning at two o'clock a.m.

During the lectures, I hope to engage in field research about Vietnamese perspectives on and reactions to Shakespeare. I have prepared a series of questionnaires to distribute after my lectures; I hope to learn much and to start to refine my ideas of Shakespeare around the globe.

One question I have for the students is "Tác giả nào anh chị coi là Shakepspeare của Việt Nam? Tại sao?" For those of us who, like me, don't speak vietnamese, that translates to "Who would you consider the Shakespeare of Vietnam to be and why?" I'm not sure what answers that will elicit (though I think The Tale of Kieu is likely to come up somewhere), and that's fascinating.

I'll also be eliciting responses from the Vietnamese students and faculty members on how they would retell certain plays—Hamlet, for example—in a Vietnamese setting. The image above is of a graphic novel of Hamlet in Vietnamese that I'll use to help convey the narrative.

This will be a whirlwind tour, but I'll try to find time to update you, my alert readers, about what I learn—and I anticipate that it will be a very great deal.

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Bonus for those who have read this far: A blurb—in Vietnamese—about Shakespeare!

The St. Crispin's Day Speech in the Globe Production of Henry V

Henry V: Globe on Screen. Dir. Dominic Dromgoole. Perf. Jamie Parker, Brid Brennan, and Graham Butler. 2012. DVD. Kultur, 2013.

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To conclude our brief series on St. Crispin's Day Speeches (should that be "St. Crispins' Day" or even "St. Crispins' Days" by this point?), let us head to the Globe Theatre.

No, not that one. That one burned down in 1613, silly, and I'm no Doctor Who (for whom, q.v.). Let's head to the New Globe Theatre, which has been producing more and more DVDs of its productions, allowing the Globe Theatre to come to those who find it hard to go to the Globe theatre.

As my students instantly recognized, this production pays more attention to the language of the speech than others do. It's still telling, moving speech, but it depends on the speech to do that—not on camera angles or soundtracks.

And it has a brief moment of humor—though I'm not sure it works. When Henry offers to put money in the purses of those who don't wish to fight, one soldier pretends to consider the offer. It gets a laugh, and the soldier clearly indicates that he's not seriously considering the proposition, but it also interrupts the flow of the speech, and the actor has a bit more work to do to get the momentum back again.

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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The St. Crispin's Day Speech in The Wars of the Roses

Henry V. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. Perf. Ben Bazell, Roger Booth, and Philip Bowen. Wars of the Roses. 1991. DVD. Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2005.

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While we were in St. Crispin's Day vein, the students and I tried out the version provided by the War of the Roses series—I suppose you could call it the Hollow Crown of the early 1990s.

This version of the speech provides yet another take on Shakespeare's lines. I think they're still rousing—one of my contentions is that it's very difficult to deliver the lines in a way that lacks all inspiration (which didn't keep Babakitis from managing it in his 2007 version—for which, q.v.).

Rousing though it is, it finds its appeal in a different place. In this version, Westmoreland, who's "O that we now had here / But one ten thousand of those men in England / That do no work to-day! (IV.iii.16-18) initiates Henry's response, is shamed by Henry's overhearing the remark, and the rest of the speech is driven to shame him (and, perhaps, the others on stage) into willingness to fight:

I've never seen this motivation drive the speech . . . which isn't to say that the speech doesn't make me want to grab my longbow (or, in this version, my AK-47) and rush into the fray.

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Links: The Series at IMDB.

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Say Hello to Hal from The Hollow Crown

Henry V. By William Shakespeare. Perf. Edward Akrout, Tom Hiddleston, and Tom Brooke. Dir. Thea Sharrock. The Hollow Crown. Season 1, episode 4. BBC Two. 21 July 2012. DVD. Universal Studios, 2013.

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Technically, I should have been following The Hollow Crown's broadcasts of Shakespeare's second tetralogy rabidly since 2012, but time has conspired to prevent me from doing so.

And, technically, I still haven't watched them. I know it's nearly heretical to say so, but I've dipped into The Hollow Crown's films and haven't been utterly compelled to shove everything else on my plate off onto the floor and devote every waking moment to the series.

But I was interested in exploring different versions of the St. Crispin's Day speech with my Shakespeare and film class, and my class and I both enjoy it when we're all looking at a film for the first or second time (rather than looking at a film I've seen two dozen times and they've never seen), so I determined to try a few I hadn't yet seen, and The Hollow Crown's Henry V was on the list.

I was impressed by the approach here, especially in contrast to Branagh's (for which, q.v.), Olivier's (for which, q.v.), and especially Babakitis—notable for being the absolute worst I've ever encountered (for which, if you can stomach it, q.v.).

Hiddleston's approach is understated but still very effective. His crowd is small, and the camera is nearly on a level with everyone (instead of privileging Henry, as in most versions). And the scene very nearly have no soundtrack—until we reach "band of brothers," at which point they just can't help themselves. Take a look:

My students were very adept at finding all sorts of interesting things to say about the clip, and it has convinced me that I should find the time to watch the films in their entirety.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Shakespearean Texts, Texted; or, Texting the Text of the Bard

Shakespeare, William, and Courtney Carbone. srsly Hamlet. New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, and Brett Wright. YOLO Juliet. New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, and Courtney Carbone. Macbeth #killingit. New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2016.

Shakespeare, William, and Brett Wright. A Midsummer Night #nofilter. New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2016.

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I stumbled across a new series from Random House when browsing through my local bookstore the other day. It's called "OMG Shakespeare," and it retells four (so far) of the plays as text exchanges between the characters.

I'm a bit torn about these books. Clearly, I'm not in the center of the demographic for the books. There are also parts of them that are really bad—by which I suppose I mainly mean "uninteresting." But then there are also very clever ways of grappling with the problems that arise when presenting these stories in this medium. And the kids I've shown these to (kids that I've directed in multiple Shakespeare productions—so they know their Shakespeare, and they also know their Snapchats, their emojis, their Facebooks and Twitters, and their other social medias) really, really like them. They show each other certain pages or comments and they laugh hysterically.

I'll give you some examples from srsly Hamlet. At its worst, it becomes nothing more than a rebus—and even the kids who like these books acknowledge that it's inauthentic—they don't actually text that way. Here's Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery" speech:

That can be very tedious and annoying. But then the book will play with the form in a genuinely interesting way, bringing other forms of social media into play. Here are two two-page spreads as an example. First, Polonius gives his advice to Laertes. Then Laertes accidentally tells Ophelia in a group text to remember what he said, giving Polonius the opportunity to put his nose in. And don't fail to note the end of the sequence: Ophelia updates her relationship status Facebook-style.

There's some interest and some cleverness in that—and the idea is caught up again after the nunnery scene. Ophelia moves from "In a relationship" to "It's complicated" to . . . this:

The two reactions also show some depth of thought. Horatio is concerned—probably mostly for Hamlet, but also for Ophelia. Rosencrantz is a bit clueless—he just wants to make sure she'll be at the play-within-the-play.

I also very much—far too much, in fact—appreciated what happens to Ophelia when she goes mad:

I'm very likely to use that in future courses when we discuss the line "They aim at it / And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (IV.v.9-10). I'll invite students to see if they find any correlation between any of Ophelia's mad speeches / songs and the emojis here.

And it's remarkable how, when Laertes enters, having zipped back from Paris, we get the description "Laertes has checked into Elisnore Castle—with Huge Angry Mob," under which is the delightful message "Huge Angry Mob Likes This."

Finally (for that book), the kids were especially tickled by Fortinbras' entrance at the end of the play:

In YOLO Juliet, the emphasis is placed on the parents' (and other elders') inability to navigate the world of social media—often with humorous results. One prime example is Friar John's use of all caps—which amounts to shouting—is a sign of his incompetence. In the same exchange, you'll notice that Friar Lawrence initials each of his texts as if they were e-mails or memos:

Lady Capulet takes Friar Lawrence's failing one step further. She signs off each text as if it were the end of a letter. In the example below, she also inexplicably "likes" something Capulet is doing:

There are also a few other social media things thrown in with pop cultural references to round things out. Observe what Juliet decides to listen to (and the service she chooses to listen to it with) after the balcony scene:

The narrative ends as I imagine you would expect it to—according to Shakespeare. But if you're worried that it's a downer, think again:

In short, these books demonstrate some intriguing and imaginative uses of social media to tell the stories of Shakespeare—but there's a lot of tedious rebus-esque material there, too. I don't think they would be of much use (or very funny) to those who lack familiarity with the plays. But for those who do (and are in the right demographic), they appear to be a hoot.

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The Bad Sleep Well: Kurosawa's Masterful Derivative of Hamlet

The Bad Sleep Well [Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru]. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshirô Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Kyôko Kagawa, and Tatsuya Mihashi. 1960. DVD. Criterion, 2006.

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One of my favorite Hamlet derivatives is Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well.  Even though Throne of Blood (for which, q.v.) gets most of the Kurosawa / Shakespeare press—and rightfully so, as it is utterly superb—The Bad Sleep Well is incredible.

The film's opening is crafted in such a way as to interest its viewers—and to confuse those who have been told that this is a Hamlet derivative. There's no ghost—no watchman on the battlements—not even an announcement about a wedding following so hard upon a funeral.

We do get a wedding, but it's not what those looking for Hamlet connections expects. Instead it's a wedding of some high-ups in the Japanese business world. The wedding takes place in one large room with a group of journalists—somehow smelling out a scandal—cordoned off in a separate, adjoined room.

After watching further, we learn that the film's plot involves a Hamlet-like character named Nishi who marries Yoshiko, the daughter of a corrupt official, as part of a secret plan to bring that official and the entire company to justice for its corruption and its role in his father’s suicide.  Yoshiko and her brother Tatsuo are similar to Ophelia and Laertes.

We open, in other words, with the marriage of the analogues for Hamlet and Ophelia.

Neither Nishi nor Yoshiko speak during the first scene, which lasts nearly twenty minutes; however, there’s enough talk about them to excuse their silence.  During the preliminaries, Tatsuo is twice described as Nishi’s friend and once as Iwabuchi’s son before he is described as Yoshiko’s sister.  When Yoshiko enters, limping, a close-up reveals that one of her legs is substantially shorter than the other.  She stumbles while ascending the steps, and Tatsuo, rather than Nishi, helps her up and escorts her to the banquet.  Rumors fly among the journalists that Nishi is only marrying Yoshiko to advance his position in the company, but Tatsuo, when he gets the chance to make a speech, passionately defends Nishi—adding this as his conclusion:  “Listen, Nishi.  If you make my sister unhappy, I swear I’ll kill you.”

The toast is shocking to the business-minded audience—but not nearly as shocking as the arrival of a second wedding cake.

I'd love to give you the entirety of the first scene, but that is too much. Here, instead, are the last seven minutes or so of the opening scene. Pay particular attention to the different levels of viewers here—especially in one remarkable shot where we, as the camera, look over the shoulder of the bride and groom into the faces of the businessmen and then, beyond them, through the entire room to the group of journalists in the adjoining room, intensely watching for any sign of scandal:

I imagine it will be hard for most of you not to track the film down at your earliest opportunity to see how the rest of it plays out. The cake with the rose marking the window from which the analogue of Hamet's father supposedly jumped becomes something of the play-within-the-play in compressed form.

And look at the framing of this shot—it's remarkable!

When you watch the rest of the film, you'll find much more to think about, and all of it will set you scrambling back to the text of Hamlet with new and intriguing perspectives on the plot and the characters.

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Book Note: Station Eleven

Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. New York: Vintage, 2015.

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I read this book twice in quick succession: the first time because the narrative was enormously compelling and the second time to be certain that the depth of character and theme was really as profound as I thought it was the first time. And it certainly was.

Please don't run away screaming when I start to tell you about the plot. It's a post-apocalyp—

Hey! Wait! Come back! I promise it's not like that!

When I heard that this novel was a post-apocalyptic narrative, I was skeptical. The Hunger Games and Divergent and the rest have soured me to the genre. But this is a masterpiece that uses the idea of a post-apocalyptic world to transcend the genre completely.

I also heard that there was a Shakespeare connection; that pushed me heavily toward reading it.

The novel opens with an actor putting on King Lear—and dying from a heart attack in the middle of Act IV, scene vi.

That night, a devastating pandemic (the Georgia flu) arrives in America. It sweeps across America and around the world, killing nearly everyone who is exposed to it.

The novel then explores what takes place twenty years later—but without leaving the time just before and just after the Georgia flu unexplored. Indeed, that's what I found so masterful and so genre-breaking about this novel: what happens twenty years after and what happens two weeks before the breakout are explored nearly equally in order to make sense out of the breakout, civilization (and its downfall), and the human condition.

In the section set twenty years after the Georgia flu, we mostly follow the experiences of The Traveling Symphony—a group of actors and musicians who have come together in the wake of the collapse of civilization:

The Symphony performed music—classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements of pre-collapse pop songs—and Shakespeare. They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.

"People want what was best about the world," Dieter said. (37-38)

The Traveling Symphony has, as a sort of motto, Survival is insufficient, which, one of the characters says, "would be way more profound if we hadn't lifted it from Star Trek" (119). The motto implies that there's more to life than mere survival—and the novel explores that theme in all its intricacies and mysteries.

In that (and in the use of Shakespeare), it's a bit like Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (for which, q.v.), but without Woody Allen as the Fool and without the off-putting Avant-garde segments.

I'm providing two things to inspire you to read this novel. First, the opening three pages (click to enlarge):

Second, here's a list from early in the novel of what's been lost with the fall of civilization. I found it moving and entirely fitting with the way the novel develops its themes:

I found the novel to be compelling on a number of levels, and I highly recommend it—and (unusually) not just for the Shakespeare.

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Bonus Image!  A screenshot of the quote from Star Trek: Voyager:

Shakespeare: The Planet

Card, Orson Scott. Ender in Exile. New York: Tor Science Fiction, 2009.

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With a small kernel of a short story called "Ender's Game," Orson Scott Card developed a intricately-detailed universe spanning centuries both prior to and long after the events depicted in the novel Ender's Game. Among the dozen or twenty novels in the Enderverse is Ender in Exile, set between the first and second novels in the Ender series.

Without giving away too much, the novel tells the story of Ender's journey to the colonized planet of which he is to become the governor. On the journey, Ender and some of the passengers put on a reading of The Taming of the Shrew. That part is somewhat interesting in how it connects to the larger themes of the novel, but it's not as intriguing as the e-mail correspondence between Ender and the acting governor of the colony—especially when they discuss the name the planet and its settlements should have.

The correspondence picks up in the middle. Ender has evidently proposed calling the planet "Prospero," but the acting governor explains why that wouldn't be very much appreciated.

I'm providing a block quote (of a fashion) below with the exchange (94-99):

The conclusion, then, is to call the whole planet Shakespeare (and to give that name to the first town); future towns will be named after characters in Shakespeare.

It makes me wonder how the other cities will choose their names—and how that would affect tourism. "Caliban City: A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

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Book Note: The Gap of Time

Winterson, Jeanette. The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold. London: Hogarth Shakespeare, 2015.

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As long-time readers (and, really, even first-time readers) can imagine, I was extremely interested to hear of the new Hogarth Shakespeare series that started last year. Well-known authors are signing up to write novels that retell Shakespeare's plays.

Apparently, Jeanette Winterson was tapped to try her hand at it, and she chose to retell The Winter's Tale in her novel The Gap of Time. The title is drawn from Leontes' final speech in the play, which concludes with these lines:

                                              Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand an answer to his part
Perform'd in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissever'd: hastily lead away. (V.iii.151-55)

Settling down to read the novel—called "The Cover Version" (7) by its author—over Christmas break, I was thrilled by the first chapter—and then pretty deeply disappointed by the rest of the novel. To give you a sense of the opening, I'm excerpting the first part of the first chapter. It starts just after Shakespeare's "Exit pursued by a bear" (IV.iii.58.s.d.). Note: I've done a little "explicative deleted" (or "Nixonizing") to the excerpt below. 

I find that to be very satisfying and very interesting. And the same can be said of a number of plot devices in The Gap of Time.  The oracle is replaced by a DNA test for paternity.  Autolycus is a used car dealer—and his dealership is called "AUTOS LIKE US." And the author even works in a clever reference to herself in a Wikipedia entry about one of the characters in the novel—"MiMi made her acting debut in 2002 onstage at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Deborah Warner's adaption of The PowerBook—a novel by the British writer Jeanette Winterson" (49).  

But with all that going for it, I'm not sure the novel as a whole works very well. The main part of that is the extreme stress Winterson puts on any of the homoeroticism in the play. Her Leontes and Polixenes analogues had a homosexual fling in their youth, and Polixenes still self-identifies as gay. This explains why he can be in the Hermione analogue's bedroom while she's changing in and out of various outfits (while Leontes watches on secretly-installed survellience camera and works himself into a fever pitch of obscene jealousy). But Polixenes needs a son to meet up with Leontes' daughter eventually, so he has had a heterosexual fling in order to have a son. Much of the novel doesn't seem contrived, but that element does. And even though Leontes' jealousy is irrational, if Polixenes is gay, it makes it a bit less believable (which is not a great direction to take, since it already totters on the unbelievable).

I'm eager to see what else the Hogarth Shakespeare series will give us; this one had a great deal of promise, but, for me, ultimately fell flat.

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Shakespeare in Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society. Dir. Peter Weir. Perf. Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, and Ethan Hawke. 1989. DVD. Touchstone Home Entertainment, 1998.

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And now let's get back to wonderful uses of Shakespeare in good films.

I know I surprised most of you when I revealed that I had never seen Good Will Hunting (for which, q.v.) until this summer.

I'm afraid I will shock you when I tell you that I had never seen Dead Poets Society until a few weeks ago.

"Were you not in training to be an English teacher in 1989?" you ask.

Well, yes, I was.

"Did you not know of the film's existence then?" you inquire.

No, I was well aware of the film and the basic elements of its plot.

"Why, then, did you not see the film?" you ask in stunned disbelief.

I'm not entirely sure, but I do remember wanting to wait until I had figured out my own teaching techniques before seeing the film. I didn't want to model my teaching on Robin Williams' interpretation of John Keating's teaching methods. This year, I started to feel relatively secure that I wouldn't be tempted to stand on desks during every lecture or have students recite Whitman while kicking soccer balls, so I broke down and watched the film.

I shouldn't have waited. You all already know this, but it's a great film with a tour de force performance by nearly everyone in it.

And the Shakespeare! Perhaps I would have seen it sooner if I had known about the Shakespeare! Here's a great scene where Williams convinces his students that Shakespeare doesn't have to be stodgy and staid, imitating what appears to be Sir John Gielgud (or the like), Marlon Brando, and John Wayne doing Shakespeare:

The culmination of the film (I'll still try to avoid spoilers for anyone who, like me, has yet to see it) involves a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the boys at the school has discovered a passion for acting, has disobeyed his father's instructions, and has taken on the role of Puck. The clip below conflates the production, providing its beginning and end—with Puck's closing speech delivered to the father, who stands disapprovingly in the back of the auditorium:

The multi-layered delivery of the lines is fascinating. It caps the play, of course, and is delivered as a piece of false modesty to the audience—but it's also delivered as a request for absolution from the disobeyed father. 

That sort of careful integration of Shakespeare into a different plot is tricky—but absolutely awe-inspiring when it pays off, as it absolutely does here. 

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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"O Horrible! Most Horrible!": Another Awful Shakespeare Derivative

Let the Devil Wear Black. Dir. Stacy Title. Perf. Jonathan Penner, Randall Batinkoff, Norman Reeds, and Mary-Louise Parker. 1999. DVD. Unapix, 2000.

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Some time ago, I chanced upon a VHS tape of this film. I watched part of it, fast-forwarded though a fair bit of it, and abandoned it. But I remembered it when thinking about how bad badly-done Shakespeare derivatives can be.

This film is a derivative version of Hamlet set in modern Los Angeles. The cover says, "Something is rotten rotten rotten in the city of angles," and I suppose that doesn't count as false advertising—except it seems to apply to what happens in the plot when it more neatly fits the quality of the film.

I'm usually thrilled by derivative versions, finding that they point us back to the text in interesting ways. This film, even though it follows the plot of Hamlet more than most, doesn't work. It ends up being crude and amateurish, and it doesn't seem to have anything thoughtful to say about Shakespeare's play.

It took some time to find a clip that would capture the film well without being vulgar or indecent, but I managed to extract this one. For lack of a clearer analogy, this scene may be something of a version of the play-within-the-play. Jack (the Hamlet analogue) reveals to Carl (our Claudius figure) that he knows about the adrenaline pills (analogous to hebenon in the ear):

Steer clear of this film—there's just not much here. 

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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